Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows) (3 page)

“Record,” she ordered, keying her RI. “Greetings; I am currently putting together a team to research a newly-discovered human colony world. I believe that the team could profit from your experience, and that you would find it a fascinating world to study. The world in question is rated Alpha-Black. You are warned that proceedings remain under seal until the information is cleared for release by the team leader.”

Her lips twitched into a smile. Alpha-Black signified the presence of alien technology of unknown origin, something that wasn’t entirely unprecedented, presenting a mystery that few researchers could hope to resist. There
were
cases of human colonists landing on worlds with alien artefacts, although several such colony settlements had ended in tragedy when they tried to land on an Ancient world. Besides, unknown alien technology might be a welcome addition to the Confederation’s tech base.

Elyria’s smile grew wider.
That
was certainly true.

“I should warn you that the level of danger on this world is undetermined,” she added, carefully. It was
very
rare for any pre-singularity society to have the ability to detect the Confederation’s survey ships, let alone hurt them. “Contact with the locals may expose the team to unknown dangers. There may also be other dangers in local space. If this makes you reluctant to join the team, please let us know.”

And
that
, she knew, was unlikely. Entire reputations – the sole means of determining seniority in the Confederation – had been built on Alpha-Black technology. Most Interventionists would give their right arms for a chance to join a mission to a world with unknown, perhaps hyper-advanced technology. Even the warning that there might be danger wouldn’t stop them. Being killed while visiting the planet and posing as natives was an occupational hazard.

“You will be required to maintain seal until the records are released,” she concluded. “Should you wish to join, please reply to this message and arrangements will be made to transport you to the survey ship. If not, please let me know. Thank you.”

She grinned as she stopped recording. “Dispatch that to the names on the first list,” she ordered. “We should hear back from them within a few hours; if they refuse to join the mission we’ll simply move on to the names on the second list.”

“Done,” the AIs informed her. There was a pause. “The Peacekeepers wish to inform you that they have selected the PKS
Hamilton
to serve as the mobile base, with Captain Thor in command.”

“Thank you,” Elyria said, with some irritation. No one had ever been able to explain the concept of privacy to the AIs, even the point that it was considered rude to read someone’s personal messages without permission. But then, they
were
the datanet that bound the Confederation together. “And have they selected a liaison officer?”

“Not as yet,” the AIs said. There was a pause. “Do you wish to go over the information from Darius again?”

“Not yet,” Elyria said, after a moment’s thought. She’d been on sabbatical when the AIs had invited her to attend the CSC meeting. There would only be a few days before she had to leave the Smoke Ring and travel to link up with the
Hamilton
and the rest of the research team. “I think I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to relax.”

“You might wish to play a VR simulation,” the AIs suggested. “A sword and sorcery fantasy would help prepare you for Darius.”

Elyria shook her head. “I can’t afford preconceptions,” she said, firmly. “Besides, I want to find a partner and
relax
. There won’t be any time for relaxation on Darius.”

“We understand,” the AIs said. “Enjoy yourself.”

***

There was a moment of timelessness... and then Dacron’s eyes snapped open.

Instantly, he started to choke. His body was dying, already. He knew he was dying. Raw panic, such a powerful and terrifying sensation, flowed through his mind. Helplessly, he allowed the body’s instincts to take control and draw the first gasping breath. The panic died down as he started to breathe properly, allowing him to look around. He was lying on a gel-field bed, in the midst of a hospital chamber. Carefully, slipping and sliding on the force field, he sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. They felt wobbly, but his body seemed to know how to balance itself.

A reflective force field shimmered into existence and Dacron studied his naked body thoughtfully. He was male, with brown hair and a face that was designed to be instantly forgettable, with few distinguishing marks. Strong muscles dominated his arms and legs, pushed right to the limit of what was possible without biological modification. His eyesight, along with his other senses, had been enhanced, although there were no signs of it visible to the naked eye. Raw sensation ran along his nerves as he touched himself, running his hands down his body, before tapping the side of the bed.

“Welcome to the world,” a blonde woman said, materialising from nowhere. “How much do you remember?”

For a moment, he could only stare, feeling desire and lust pounding through his mind. His entire body stiffened before he caught himself, remembering just who and what he was. She gave him an odd smile, as if she understood exactly what he was thinking, before pushing her hand against the bed. It passed through the structure as if it wasn’t really there.

A hologram
, Dacron thought.
A
...

An overpowering sense of loss struck him and he staggered, almost falling to the deck. He’d lost so much and gained so little, even though he’d volunteered for the experience. How could any of them understand what it would be like until they actually did it? Right now, he felt almost suicidal. He didn’t want to live like this!

“We understand,” the blonde said. “And we are sorry.”

“Yeah,” Dacron said. Bitterness was another new experience. “I understand.”

The AIs were not human. Indeed, no human could truly hope to understand the strange mentality their creations had developed over the centuries since the first AI had come to life. They were not purely independent minds, nor a hive mind, but a combination of the two, a flowing network of mentalities that blurred together and separated as the situation demanded. They were so smart, it was said, that they could predict what any given human would be doing a year in the future, simply by analysing the vast torrent of data pouring into their mentality from all over the Confederation. Their homeworld, Calculus, was a giant hyper-spatial structure that partly existed in hyperspace, allowing their thoughts to run at terrifying speeds. They believed that there was no problem they couldn’t solve, given time.

And the quantum foam
annoyed
them. They knew it existed, but they couldn’t sense it, let alone manipulate it. The fact that other races had succeeded galled them, insofar as they had anything that humans would recognise as emotions, and they’d been devoting increasingly large sections of their mentality to studying the problem. Like the rest of the Confederation, they wanted the power to hack reality itself. For the AIs, it was almost an obsession, at least partly driven by the existence of the Dead Zone and the inexplicable technology on the Ancient worlds. Who knew
what
a hostile race, armed with such technology, could do to the Confederation? The AIs would be snuffed out in a moment if a Dead Zone formed around Calculus. It could not be tolerated.

Dacron took a deep breath, and then another, trying hard to grasp the concepts floating through his mind. The Ancient worlds were frustrating to the AIs, simply because they couldn’t investigate them directly. And Darius was another frustration. The AIs didn’t hate humanity – there was certainly no reason to wage war on the human race, who’d
created
the early AIs – but they prided themselves on being smarter than their creators. Watching humans on Darius – primitive humans, at that – perform ‘magic’ puzzled and alarmed the AIs. Why couldn’t
they
do that?

But they couldn’t. And they couldn’t even investigate in person.

“I am an AI,” he said, out loud. Except he wasn’t, not any longer. He’d been separated from the collective intelligence that made up the AIs, stripped down to the bare essentials and incorporated into a cloned human body. Other memories flowed through his mind as he started to pace, learning how to let the body control itself. “I am an embodied human.”

“That is correct,” the AI representative said. The procedure for embodying an AI in a human mind didn’t always work perfectly. Some simply collapsed into shock, unable to take the strain of being flesh and blood after existing as a mentality flowing through the AI matrix; others simply lost control of their human forms and had to be restrained before they did something criminal. “Welcome to the world.”

Dacron felt a flash of resentment as he started to open drawers, looking for clothes. One drawer revealed a set of basic overalls, designed by the Peacekeepers, and a small wristcom. The overalls looked ugly – it was funny how he’d never noticed that while he’d been part of the AI collective – but he pulled them on anyway, noticing that the space for his rank badge was blank. It wasn’t too surprising. Being a Peacekeeper was one of the few ways to achieve renown in the Confederation and custom dictated that no rank badges were to be worn when not on active duty. Custom also dictated that no one was to wear Peacekeeper uniforms without actually being a Peacekeeper, but the AIs were intimately linked to the Peacekeepers. He wouldn’t be posing if he wore the uniform.

He looked at himself in the mirror field and nodded. “I am ready,” he said, flatly. “When do we depart for Darius?”

A moment later, he caught himself. He should have
known
when they were departing, but the memory was gone. The sheer immensity of AI thoughts, to say nothing of their vast database of information, was too much for a biological brain, even one designed to be smarter than anything mere evolution had ever produced. He’d known that he would be weakened, that he would be crippled, but he hadn’t fully grasped what that meant, until now. Knowing was very different from experiencing... everything that wasn’t related to Darius had been sliced out of his memory. And even then, some thoughts were just too much for his new brain to comprehend, vague concepts that slipped away whenever he looked at them.

The AI representative took pity on him. “This ship is currently heading for Travis’s Star, where it will rendezvous with PKS
Hamilton
,” she said. “There, you will meet the rest of the research team. They are smart, so there is no point trying to hide your true nature from their sight. Their personnel files are stored in your wristcom for when you are ready to study them.”

Dacron nodded. No embodied AI could hope to pass for human, at least not without years of experience. The other members of the team would know him for what he was the moment he opened his mouth. They might find him strange, or repulsive, but there was no other choice. The only technology that worked consistently on Ancient worlds – and Darius, they assumed – was biological. An embodied AI was the closest the AIs could come to studying the mystery that bedevilled their minds. If only they were capable of maintaining even a basic communications link.

“I understand,” he said. He found himself struck with a sudden longing he didn’t know how to comprehend. “Are there other humans onboard this vessel?”

“You will need to be tested first,” the AI representative said, firmly. Dacron knew better than to argue. He thought he was sane, but the AIs wouldn’t take chances. A door hissed open in the far wall, revealing a second room studded with holographic projectors. “Walk through the door.”

Dacron nodded, feeling a flash of very human frustration. To the AIs, it was nothing more than an irritant, more of an illusion of an emotion rather than an emotion itself. To a human, frustration was a powerful – and dangerous – force. He stepped forward, wondering just how humans managed to control themselves, and into the room, shaking his head when he saw a holographic simulation of a gym, complete with a tutor. The first stage in the tests would be proving that he could control his human body.

“I have a question,” he said, thirty minutes later. His body might have been designed and then woven together in a clone tank, but it had never been exercised. He ached all over. “Why do I not have a neural link?”

“It would distract you from learning to be human,” the AI representative informed him. “We did not wish you transcribing yourself into an AI core before we were ready to re-assimilate you. Besides, only a small percentage of the human population has a neural link. You might well become dependent upon it and then discover that it was useless on Darius.”

Dacron nodded, feeling another flicker of human emotion. The AIs showed no sign of recognising it; instead, they threw another simulation at him, and then another. He worked his way through them one by one, trying to understand the often illogical nature of the simulations. Was it really likely that a human would try to seduce him?

Of course it was, he reminded himself, a moment later. The vast majority of the Confederation’s population spent their first century chasing pleasure in all its myriad forms, changing their bodies to suit themselves. There were no taboos within the Confederation, with the possible exception of incest. A human who saw an embodied computer might just try to seduce him, if only to see what would happen. Dacron pushed the thought aside and concentrated on the simulation. It grew harder to maintain his control as the holograms pushed their way further into his personal space.

“You will remain under close observation until we reach the
Hamilton
,” the AIs said, finally. “Once you are cleared, you will be permitted to operate freely among humans.”

“Thank you,” Dacron said. They didn’t trust him! Cold logic said that they would be wise not to trust him until they
knew
he could behave himself, but cold logic seemed to be powerless against human emotion. “I will not let you down.”

“Good,” the AIs said. They’d probably keep pushing him into simulations, including scenarios he wouldn’t realise
were
simulations. An AI would notice an artificial world at once, but that was beyond his human senses. “We will be depending on you.”